[New Creator] 〈9〉 Dong-A Theater Awards ‘New Concept Theater Award’ Director and playwright Kang Hoon-gu
A play with 10 children who have never acted before… Work on a script by gathering opinions during practice
“The more citizen artists there are, the higher the social standard”… The new work also includes the illegal martial law situation on December 3.
“I think the number of citizen artists, not elite artists, indicates the level of society. We can only move forward to the ‘next society’ if there are more people who live as protagonists and bring issues around them to the stage. “The goal of my play is to bridge the gap between everyday art and professional art.”
Kang Hoon-gu (34), director and playwright of the theater production group ‘Gong Play Club’, won the 61st Dong-A Theater Awards New Concept Theater Award last year for ‘Strange Children’s Play – Five Senses’, a play starring 10 non-professional child actors with no acting experience.
At the time, this play received praise for “breaking the prejudice against children’s plays.” That’s not all. Director Kang swept major theater awards, including last year’s Dong-A Theater Award and the ‘Best 3 Plays of the Year’ selected by the Korean Theater Critics Association, with works that broke away from existing theater conventions and formats. When we met at the Yeonhee Arts Theater in Seodaemun-gu, Seoul on the 3rd, he said, “I am happy and scared. “I think this award was given because the cast and creative team stood out more than the director,” he said, smiling brightly.
The new work ‘Clytemnestra’ currently being performed at the Yeonhui Arts Theater is also different from the production process. Instead of the traditional method of coming out with a script first and then starting practice, I started writing only after practicing. This is the reason why recent events, such as the illegal martial law of December 3, were vividly captured in this work with the motif of the Greek tragedy ‘Agamemnon’.
Director Kang said, “Because theater is an art that takes place in front of the audience, narrowing the time difference is more important than movies or dramas. I hoped that the audience who witnessed the world on stage would take a step back and think about the real political society.”
The adventure of ‘Ball Club’ shines even more in children’s and youth dramas. It boldly broke away from the unwritten rule of ‘children’s plays without children’, where adult actors usually play children’s roles. In particular, ‘Weird Children’s Play – Ogamdo’ reinterpreted Lee Sang’s poem ‘Ogamdo’, well known as ‘The ○ child is also scary, Grio’, with the children’s imagination.
Against a background of eerie dissonance, the work unhesitatingly mentions war and divorce, noting that children are not just frightened beings but ‘scary beings’. In fact, the script was completed with the ideas of children who participated in the production. Director Kang said, “I wanted to transform it from a didactic play into a play that asks questions,” and emphasized, “The reason why children are easily scared is because they do not have enough information, not because it is difficult to accept ‘things that children don’t need to know.’”
Director Kang did not focus on producing so-called ‘unprofitable’ children’s and youth dramas from the beginning. While a student at Korea University’s Department of Political Science and Diplomacy, he was a “member of the Theater Arts Research Group’s ‘Nailong’” and entered the theater world in 2017 by writing a socially critical play. Her debut work, ‘What Happened in the 2nd Curriculum 2 of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, After the Controversy over the Forgery of Beauty’ was selected as the new work of the year by the Creative Writing Center of the Arts and Culture Commission. However, as I saw the world not changing as much as I expected even after political upheaval, big and small, I deeply asked myself what I had hoped for as a child. From this point on, plays for those who want to become adults began.
“Critical discourse is good, but I wanted to do an honest play. I think the reason the majority of audiences who come to see children’s plays are in their 20s and 30s is because they want to recover, even if belatedly, the desires and concerns that had to be put on hold during their childhood. “Through theater, I want to honestly ask teenagers and young adults, ‘Am I living well?’”
This innocence is the basis of the ball club, which ‘plays like a ball game’. The concept is to roll questions like a ball, bouncing here and there.
“Playing ball requires time, space, friends, and the willingness to throw away clothes. It’s a world where it’s not easy to get any of them right, but I hope there are more people doing plays. Even if it’s a school art festival, it’s okay. “In a society where everyone has fun and it’s okay for anyone to make mistakes, just our gathering together becomes an incident.”
Reporter Lee Ji-yoon [email protected]
-
- great
- 0dog
-
- I’m sad
- 0dog
-
- I’m angry
- 0dog